I watched Super Bowl LIV from a couch in Sellwood, in a room split evenly between people who were there for the football and people who were there for the commercials, and the two halves spent four hours talking over each other.
By the third quarter something had sorted itself out. Nobody was arguing about which spot was best. They were arguing about which ones they could still describe.
That is a much shorter list than the agencies who made them would like.
Hyundai bought sixty seconds and spent all of them on one joke. Boston accents, a parking space, Smaht Pahk. Jeep bought sixty seconds and spent all of them on one joke. Bill Murray, a groundhog, the same morning forever. Both premises are simple enough to explain at a bus stop, and both spots hold the premise the whole way and then stop.
A sixty second ad is not a container for four ideas. It is a container for one idea told slowly enough to land.
Everything forgettable on Sunday failed the same way. A celebrity opens, a second celebrity arrives, a joke starts, a different joke interrupts it, a product benefit gets read aloud, and a tagline appears that has nothing to do with any of it. Five ideas, none finished. The room does not remember the brand because the spot never gave the room one thing to hold.
Three things separated the ones that worked. One, the premise was stated in the first six seconds and never revised. Two, the brand was the reason the joke functioned rather than a sticker at the end. Smaht Pahk is a parking feature. Groundhog Day is a vehicle that makes repeating the same morning look like a good time. Three, the ending was an ending, not a pile of legal copy and four logos.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I know exactly how the four idea version happens. It does not happen in the creative. It happens in review. Someone needs the fuel economy line. Someone else needs the app mentioned. Nobody is willing to be the person who cuts their own priority, so the spot absorbs everything and the audience absorbs nothing.
The room does not remember the brand because the spot never gave the room one thing to hold.
The discipline that produces a good Super Bowl spot is not creative discipline. It is the discipline to say no in November to somebody who outranks you.
Truffles slept through the entire game on the arm of the couch. Barnaby woke up exactly once, when everybody in the room shouted at the same time, looked around, decided the premise did not concern him, and went back down. One idea, committed to, held for the full run. Better instincts than half the field.